Weight: 216.6 (-14.6)
Fat: 32.4% (-6.9%)
Meals: 1701 kcal
Exercise: Cardio (Treadmill 29:00 WL5 - 372 calories, 2.11 miles)
Pictures: Front/Side/Back/Flex
My primary goal has been to make changes in my lifestyle (and as a result, changes in my body), to live a healthier and more fulfilled life. So what I'm about to say is a bit odd in that context. I've decided to continue eating junk food for most if not all of my weight loss. Eventually I plan to eat healthier and pay more attention to what I eat, but for now I'm going to continue to eat the same foods that I've been eating for the past five weeks, which consist primarily of fast food, frozen pizzas, and various restaurant fare.
Additionally, I'm going to start updating the Meals section above with calorie counts and if you hover over that number, you should see macronutrient percentages as well. Eventually I'll put more details online, but for now the basics are above and eventually I'll link out to the full details.
So why have I decided to do this? Well, for several reasons actually. First, it's a diet I'm comfortable with and I strongly believe that drastic changes are more likely to result in me giving up. Sticking with foods that I enjoy and have eaten for a long time will give me a sense of continuity as I make changes in my life.
But it's not just about me, I want to prove a point to others as well. As I've mentioned before, I've spent a lot of time recently looking through forums, blogs, websites even old-fashioned dead tree books for information on dieting and exercise. Everyone has their own spin on what has made our country so collectively fat and what changes we need to slim back down. I've known for quite some time that calories are the key, which has been frustrating because so few fat loss plans focus on that particular measure of weight change potential.
Now, I'm not so full of myself that I went into this thinking I'd figured it all out. Which is why I've been scouring every source of information I can find to not only confirm my beliefs, but also for information that contradicts them. Ultimately the important thing is losing weight, and doing so in a sustainable way. That means finding the path of least resistance, the easiest, simplest and most effective way to drop the pounds. If that means admitting I was stupidly wrong, I'm more than happy to do so. Results are more important than ego.
That being said, I've encountered too many instances of well-meaning but misinformed people spreading misinformation with a false sense of authority. Worse, there are certified experts, those with degrees in nutrition and even medical doctors who seem to either parrot long-debunked myths or are selling their own brand of pseudoscience. Sometimes they back up their theories and ideas with research and studies, but if you spend enough time in science you know that you can justify nearly anything with enough data.
I finally reached the breaking point when two separate things happened. Firstly, I was reading a forum thread on intermittent fasting on a low carb message board that contained folks who were desperately seeking answers, and others who seemed willing to share but just got so much wrong. The number of people speaking authoritatively about how body processes work when scientists don't agree on the processes in question just bugged the hell out of me. As bad as the misinformation was though, the saddest part for me was the obsession that people had with the minutia of their diet, spending god knows how many hours trying to figure out some magical combination of foods and preparation that will be just the right fix for their problem.
The other thing that caused me to snap was reading "a calorie is not a calorie" for what feels like the thousandth time. I've read this from people I admire who have otherwise solid information and advice, and I've read this from borderline crackpots. My first inclination when encountering a concept in multiple places like this is to search for more information, both in support of and critical to that viewpoint. And goodness knows there's plenty of it.
Most of the folks spouting the "calorie is not a calorie" line seem to be low-carb. I first encountered Atkins over a decade ago, although I think the original book was published a couple years before I was born. Lately the movement has been taken up by Dr. Michael Eades with his Protein Power diet. Dr. Agatston's South Beach Diet is effectively a low-carb diet as well, although they focus more on glycemic index than on overall carbohydrate content. Even more recently, the paleo diet (also referred to as paleolithic diet, caveman diet) has been making the rounds including as part of Mark Sisson's The Primal Blueprint. I've just begun reading Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories as well, which I have to say is an excellent read chock full of real data and an honest examination of how we're wrong about so many of the conclusions science has drawn from research.
Now each of these diets have been designed by people smarter than me, who have years and years more experience and formal training in the areas of nutrition than I ever will have. In the case of Good Calories, Bad Calories, it's far more researched than I could ever hope to aspire to for this blog. Fully aware of these facts, I still think that each of them is missing the forest for the trees, or has chosen to overemphasize certain ideas and concepts at the expense of others. Namely that the single most important thing you can do to lose weight is to cut calories.
It's not a radical concept. Calories represent energy, or work over time. Our organs need this energy to operate, our cells need it to perform their metabolic chores, and our muscles need it to move our bodies through our environment. If there's an excess of energy, it's stored for later use as fat. If there's a deficit of energy, our body pulls this energy from those fat stores. The processes by which the human body accomplishes this are heavily studied and are still in the process of being understood. It's an incredibly complex system of reactions and processes that no one has fully figured out. We're starting to piece some of it together, but there's just so much we don't know.
But losing weight doesn't require understanding all of that. Less food means less calories means burning stored fat. Yes, the different macronutrients are absorbed in different ways and are treated differently by the body. Yes, there is research that suggests carbs play an important role in weight regulation. Yes, there are health benefits/concerns of eating too little or too much of certain nutrients. But ultimately none of that really matters in terms of how you lose weight.
If you eat too many calories, you put on weight. If you eat too few calories, you lose it. It doesn't matter where those calories come from. You can starve to death eating only carbs. You can gain weight by eating only protein and fat. Some low-carbers accept this and realize that they need a caloric deficit if they want to lose weight. Others believe calories are a myth and believe sticking to some arbitrary numbers is the only way to burn fat.
So there you go, I'm going to eat junk and lose a bunch of weight by eating at McDonalds and Wendy's. I'm going to burn fat by fixing frozen pizzas and eating Hot Pockets. I'm going to go out to restaurants and I'm going to eat until I'm full. I've lost 15 pounds so far doing exactly this. And I'm going to lose even more. And if I don't... well then I'll have learned a valuable lesson and I can provide more data to suggest that you can't lose weight by eating junk food. But I really think I'm right on this one.
Oh, and to be 100% perfectly clear here, I do believe there are important health benefits to altering your diet and I do plan to do so in the future. My purpose for doing this is to prove (or disprove) that focusing solely on calories is enough to lose weight. Fats have been demonized for too long, and as a result we're eating too many carbohydrates, and too many of them are refined sugars that we could probably do without. But restricting or increasing your intake of either of these is not necessary for weight loss and obsessing over them may cause you to lose sight of the real engine of weight loss: calories.
